A trip through the year looking at a Bach cantata each week. Comments, discussions, musings, wibblings are all welcome.

Friday, 12 April 2013

Peace in our time? Am Abend der desselbigen Sabbats- Cantata for the First Sunday after Easter

Love
drives out fear. We start this week with an image of frightened
people who have voluntarily locked themselves away. The libretto for
this week's cantata begins “On the evening of the same Sabbath as
the disciples were gathered together and the doors were locked for
fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst of them”. Yes,
the disciples can always be trusted to do the right thing once
they've exhausted all the other options, and so their response to the
life-changing events of Easter week is to hide and slam the doors
shut.

But
Bach shows that outside this little fearful group something bigger
has happened. He doesn't plunge into the text straight away; rather
we have an opening instrumental movement that is full of suppressed
excitement. Tension builds up with repeated chugging woodwinds, and
the orchestration gets richer and richer as hints of burnished brass
gradually penetrate the texture. Then, in the second section, the
instrumentation thins out again, to oboe, bassoon and strings alone.
There's a wonderfully hummable oboe melody, the sort that a dozen
film and television costume drama composers dream of writing. Then,
after a harmonic jolt and a few moments in the minor, we return da
capo- to the beginning- and
we're in the exciting, thrumming world of a mini-Brandenburg concerto
again. Masaaki Suzuki in his recording with the Bach Collegium Japan
makes the repeat particularly interesting, bringing out greater
dynamic contrasts and turning up the intensity a little. So
outside the world of the text and the disciples' closed doors, we
have a sense of excitement and serene beauty; all they have to do is
notice.

Only
after Bach has established this mood does the tenor start narrating
the story. We're back to minor chords, and a repeated semiquaver
movement in the bass that sounds more neurotic than excited. But the
mood doesn't last; suddenly, Christ appears and it's as if a penny
drops; all fear is replaced by serenity when we move into one of the
longest and most gorgeous moments in any cantata. Indeed the alto
aria that follows is not only longer than the rest of the cantata put
together; it's longer than some of the short winter cantatas
entirely. It is a wonderful moment of time stopping; admittedly, it
requires superhuman breath control. Just occasionally Robin Blaze in
the luxuriant Suzuki recording has to break up a line. By contrast,
Daniel Taylor, singing for John Eliot Gardiner, carries straight
through without a breath. Gardiner's tempo at twelve and a half
minutes is nearly a minute faster than Suzuki's, but still relaxed.
At the other extreme is Nicolaus Harnoncourt, who only takes 10
minutes and 43 seconds. He keeps a genuine sense of flow in the
orchestra where sometimes Suzuki comes to a near-halt; but I found
Paul Esswood's singing style a little choppy at times, and there's
little sense of meditation. You pays your money (or your Spotify
subscription) and you takes your choice. To my mind, Suzuki's extreme
dreaminess fits with the slight unreality of the text. How is it it
that Christ is supposed to be present “wo zwei und drei
versammlet sind”- where two or
three are gathered together? We don't know- he just is. In Bach's
reverie a seemly veil is drawn over centuries of slightly fruitless
theologizing.

I'm
intrigued that Bach gives the longest arias in the cantatas to an
alto so often. The alto line probably would have been sung by older
teenagers with un-broken voices; indeed, this is still the practice
in the choir at Bach's church today. Perhaps these were the stars of
the choir school. They would have been the most reliable senior
choristers with years of continuous training under their belt, and
weren't yet focussing on degrees at the university in Leipzig as the
tenors and basses would have been. More realistically, the boy altos
wouldn't have been distracted by beer and sex either, as tenors and
basses usually are.

After
this monumental evocation of a Presence, we're brought down to earth
with what I felt was a touch of humour; an almost grotesque continuo
line hops around underneath a soprano and tenor duet which reassures
the congregation that although persecution may try to destroy them,
“es wird nicht lange währen”,
“it won't last long”- and on those very words the duet does
exactly what it says on the tin, and stops abruptly!

We're
left with a little recitative sermon from the bass, and the
accompaniment breaks into pugnacious excitement on the words “Drum
lasst die Feinde wüten!”- so
let the Enemy rage! And the aria that follows is filled with
lightning flashes from the virtuosic antiphonal violins, and an
amazing run on the word Verfolgung-
persecution. The cantata closes with one of Luther's own chorales, a
plea for “frieden... zu unsern Zeiten”
- “peace in our time”.

Looking back, there
are some difficult moments in the text of this cantata. The gospel
text unashamedly blames “the Jews” for the disciples' fear. And
the second part of the closing chorale (albeit not by Luther himself)
asks for blessings on unsern Fürsten und all'r Obrigkeit-
our princes and all authority-
so that we can live in “godliness and respectability”.
Authoritarianism and anti-semitism don't sound good, even when
dressed in Bach's sublime music; they are creeds of fear, not love.

But
while context can never excuse fully, it can help us understand. So
for the blunt references to “the Jews” in John's gospel, it might
be noted that that text may well have been written after AD 80, a
time when the Christian community were themselves the persecuted
minority within Judaism, expelled from the synagogues (and possibly
cursed in the Jewish liturgies). The more nuanced view of Judaism we
see in the other gospels is gone; Pharisees and Sadducees are
replaced in the mind of the traumatised, expelled Christians by one
monolithic “the Jews”.

Similarly, the first part of the
final chorale for peace stems from the aftermath of the Peasants'
War of 1524. Luther was horrified by the forces he had unleashed when
he sparked off the Reformation. He subsequently denounced the very
peasantry he had inspired to rebellion in his wonderfully named 1525
pamphlet Wider die Mordischen und Reuberischen Rotten der
Bawren - Against the
Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants. In
this context, the second part of the chorale, calling for good
government and quiet respectability seems perfectly in line with
Luther's own terrified thoughts.

Yet
it all falls short of the inspired excitement of the introduction and
seraphic serenity of the alto aria. Perfect love can indeed drive out
fear; but fear can make a good attempt at coming back, and the
struggle is at the heart of this cantata